The Psalms teach us to number our days. Well, that number is getting really high. Next week I hit the big 6-0. I’m trying to keep calm about it, reminding myself I’m still a kid at heart.
Yeah, that works.
Fortunately, Robyn and I are healthy and happy, and J. is still a cool place to work. So when it comes to Freud’s formula for contentment — “lieben und arbeiten” (or “love and work”) — I’m covered. Not thinking about Medicare Part D just yet.
Instead, I’m on the 60th-birthday-bash circuit, as many of my old friends are hitting the milestone around the same time. Rather than think of this as a boomer bummer, we view it as a chance to celebrate.
A few weeks ago, I attended the 60th birthday party of a high school friend who lives in Palo Alto. Now silver-haired, Dey looked fabulous, as her wife, kids and friends feted her through the night.
I, too, rose to offer a toast, retelling three tales from our early days, tales of friendship and salvation. Here they are:
When I was 13, my family moved from New York to Beverly Hills. I was a sad, sullen freshman, missing my old Manhattan life, hating my new one in California. As a proper red diaper baby, I thought volunteering to tutor black kids in Watts just might ease the pain.
Once a week, I boarded a school bus with 20 other Jewish kids and headed for the ghetto. I had no friends. But one pretty sparkplug of a girl went out of her way to sit next to me every week. That was Dey.
Though I didn’t like tutoring, I always looked forward to the bus rides, when Dey chatted me up. She chose me, the shy kid, becoming my first friend at high school. That was her first act of salvation.
Dey’s flair for the dramatic was no accident. She was a gifted actress and became a star in Beverly Hills High School’s famed drama department. I took drama classes with her, and one semester we decided to do our final together: the famous flirtation scene between Kate and Petruchio from “The Taming of the Shrew.”
We rehearsed for weeks, with much physical comedy blocked in between “If I be waspish, best beware my sting” and “I must and will have Katherine to my wife.”
On the big day, we confidently took the stage and went at it. The scene was going well when, with two minutes left, and without warning, my mind went nightmarishly blank. I could not remember my lines. The more Dey fed me cues, the more I panicked. I cut the scene short and stalked off, miserable.
Dey could have ripped me for blowing her final exam. Instead, she was only kind, worried I was beating myself up too much. (I was.) She was a true friend that day. That was her second act of salvation.
A few years later, now post-high school, Dey invited me to check out a nude beach somewhere near Malibu. Let the record reflect that nude beaches are not my thing, not now, not then, but in those days, before Dey came out as a lesbian, I still thought I had a shot at her. So I agreed to go.
In my mind’s eye I can still see her, in all her suntanned glory, arms out, prancing along the shore as if to say, “Isn’t being naked in public wonderful?” And me, collapsed in a fetal position on the sand, as if to reply, “No, no, it’s not.”
In her third act of salvation, Dey showed me how scary-wonderful it can be to reveal one’s self to the world, something I have since strived to do, with mixed results and always fully clothed.
Over the years Dey and I morphed into simcha friends. We see each other mostly at celebratory events. I went to her kids’ b’nai mitzvahs, she came to my wedding (and with her wife, Antoinette, gave us a toast for the ages).
And that’s just fine. We don’t have to see each other all the time to be the best of friends. We’ll always have Watts, Verona and Malibu.
I’m hitting the big 6-0, and the biggest life lesson so far: The indestructible friendships count most.
Dan Pine can be reached at [email protected].